Woman brought modern medicine into harmony with Navajo tradition
Story-Date: 10:49 a.m. PST Saturday , December 13, 1997

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Woman brought modern medicine into harmony with Navajo tradition


By Jerry Kammer
The Arizona Republic

With AP Photo PHO801 of Dec. 9

PHOENIX (AP) -- Every September, the northeastern Arizona town of Window
Rock swells with tens of thousands of Navajos who come from across their
sprawling reservation for a vibrant fair that combines powwow with rodeo,
fry bread with corn dogs, and Indian art shows with a baby contest invented
by Annie Wauneka to confront one of her people's biggest problems.

Forty years ago, Navajo infants were dying daily from gastrointestinal
disease and diarrhea. Bad water was usually the culprit. But parents were
reluctant to turn to hospitals, which were stigmatized as places people
went to die.

"They wouldn't take their children to the hospital until it was just about
too late to save them," said Martin Link, former director of the Navajo
Museum. "So Annie started the baby contest and arranged for doctors to
judge it."

That contact, said Link, gradually helped make Navajos more comfortable
dealing with doctors and the medicine they offered.

Such shrewdness typified the life of Annie Wauneka, who died last month at
87. Nearly 6 feet tall, with a serene toughness and a no-nonsense speaking
style, she led her people in battle against the dragons of sickness that
stalked their reservation of vast beauty and deep poverty.

Wauneka also commanded respect in Washington, where she was a powerful
lobbyist for funds to build hospitals, clinics and sanitation projects. Ron
Wood, a Navajo executive in the Indian Health Service, was a witness to her
Capitol Hill charisma.

"Most of us, when we went to Washington, we'd have to meet with
legislative aides," Wood said. "But when Annie Wauneka came to town,
senators would cancel appointments to meet with her personally."

Phoenix-area psychiatrist Dr. Carl Hammerschlag calls Wauneka "a boundary
person, a bridge person, one of those rare individuals who can stand
between different cultures and help them bridge their differences."

Wauneka served 27 years on the Navajo Nation Council. She received dozens
of honors, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and an honorary
doctorate from the University of Arizona.

"I think she was the smartest politician I've ever known," said Robert
Bergman, a former Indian Health Service physician on the reservation.
Bergman recalled how Wauneka parlayed a failed 1970s bid for a federally
funded medical school into money for more pragmatic programs.

"I told her the medical school just wasn't going to happen," Bergman said,
citing enormous logistical problems associated with starting a medical
school on the reservation.

"She told me, `Of course I know that, but think what they'll have to give
me to make me feel better about not getting it."'

Wauneka's greatest triumph of persuasion stemmed from her ability to coax
her people to accept the white man's concept of disease in their grim
confrontation with tuberculosis. In the 1950s TB was striking Navajos at a
rate eight times the national average.

"I don't think there was anyone who could match her in speaking to the
traditional Navajo people," said former Navajo Chairman Peterson Zah.

In the traditional Navajo world view, sickness was attributed not to
contagion but to a loss of harmony with spiritual forces, Zah said.

"So the people thought if there was this sickness coming to wipe out the
Navajo people, that could only happen if we misbehaved in some way."

Traditionally, a Navajo who has become ill consults a shaman -- a crystal
gazer, star gazer or hand trembler -- to learn how the balance has been
upset. Once the problem has been diagnosed, a medicine man conducts the
appropriate "sing" or ceremony, an elaborate ritual that reenacts dramas
out of Navajo mythology.

While medicine men have long been successful confronting sickness that
stems from spiritual malaise, they were powerless against TB. Annie Wauneka
tapped a different source of power.

"She wanted to know what the TB germs were, so she looked at them under a
microscope," said Ellouise DeGroat, former Indian Health Service
administrator.

Then she set out on her odyssey, a crusader in a velveteen blouse and
calico skirt. Driving a four-wheel drive pickup supplied by the Navajo
government, she visited remote sheep camps to warn her people about the
"bugs you cannot see."

As she rallied Navajos to confront the diseases, Wauneka reminded them of
the heroic journey of the Hero Twins. In Navajo lore, they traveled to
their Sun Father, who gave them the knowledge and power to slay the
monsters that were ravaging the people.

"Her point was that we were suffering the same way with tuberculosis that
the people were suffering when the monsters were here, wiping us out," Zah
said.

Ron Woods of the IHS said Wauneka's application of a traditional world view
to modern challenges "convinced the Navajo people that a hospital was a
place to go to get better, not a place to go to die."

Hammerschlag said Wauneka also applied her persuasive skills to the
physicians who came to the reservation.

"She sensitized practitioners of Western medicine to the importance of
appreciating a person's world view," he said, adding that those efforts
helped open the way for cooperation between two camps that had eyed each
other hostilely.

In her role as a cultural interlocutor, Wauneka followed the path of her
father. Chee Dodge was born in 1857, six years before the tribe was rounded
up by Army troops led by Kit Carson and taken on their bitterly remembered
"Long Walk" to captivity in New Mexico.

After their release in 1868, Chee Dodge attended school briefly in Fort
Defiance, acquiring the English-language skills that later enabled him to
be the interpreter for government agents for decades.

In 1923, when Annie was 13 years old, Chee Dodge became the first chairman
of the tribal council. That prominence brought his daughter a life of
comfort at the family's ranch in the foothills of the Chuska Mountains
along the Arizona-New Mexico border.

Still, she always clung with fierce loyalty to Navajo traditions.

Wauneka learned to shear and butcher sheep like any Navajo girl, but unlike
most young Navajos until the 1950s, she went to school. After completing
the 11th grade, she married and turned her attention to raising six
children.

Wauneka's political career began in 1951, when she ran for tribal council,
hoping to become its second woman member.

She won handily and served on the council until 1978, when she was defeated
for re-election by 16 votes. "I didn't campaign, and I think my time was
up," she said. "I think the people wanted someone younger."

But she also had created some political foes along the way, particularly in
her ultimately unsuccessful attempts to ban the Native American Church.

The church was -- and is -- controversial because it uses peyote as a
sacrament. Wauneka was a leader in a tribal council faction that opposed
the NAC as alien to Navajo tradition. But in an irony that opponents
pointed out, she herself was Catholic.

Wauneka did not shy away from confrontation. In the 1960s, when a
non-Indian lawyer who ran a reservation poverty program laughed during a
council session, she punched him in the mouth.

A decade later she defended the American Indian Movement against criticism
from council members who regarded the young militants as destructive
troublemakers. Some council members took to calling her -- behind her back
-- "Aim Annie" and "Annie Get Your Gun."

At his office at Arizona State University, where he is an assistant to
university president Lattie Coor, Zah searched for a way to express the
meaning of Annie Wauneka.

"To me, she's almost like Gandhi," he said. "I think she did more for her
people than any other Navajo, man or woman."



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